Vassals were expected to fight offensive wars up to two months a year.

She can always rile the crowd by implying that America treats their nation as a vassal state.

Presumptuous vassals, are you not ashamed

William Shakespeare -- King Henry VI, Part 1

But I am not Loki’s vassal.

Katherine Applegate -- Everworld - Search For Senna

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We are vassals no longer!" he said, and soon excused himself.

Dave Eggers -- The Circle

Besides, he was at bottom a vassal of IG Farben.

William Styron -- Sophie’s Choice

He didn’t yet know all his vassals, but he was learning.

Becca Fitzpatrick -- Hush, Hush

Are not the gentry lords, and the common people vassals?

Abigail Adams -- Remember the Ladies

He too worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!

Herman Melville -- Moby Dick

With our help, Palancar was usurped and banished, but he, his family, and their vassals refused to leave the valley.

Christopher Paolini -- Eldest

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I took my young sister (for I have another) to a place beyond the reach of this man, and where, at least, she will never be hisvassal.

Charles Dickens -- A Tale of Two Cities

O lady, deign to hold in remembrance this heart, thy vassal, that thus in anguish pines for love of thee.

Miguel de Cervantes -- Don Quixote

He plunged away into the deep sea swell, and she grew big with Pelias and Neleus, powerful vassals, in their time, of Zeus.

Homer -- The Odyssey

His art is of such power, It would control my dam’s god, Setebos, And make a vassal of him.

William Shakespeare -- The Tempest

O vassal! miscreant!

William Shakespeare -- King Lear

She sang I Dreamt that I Dwelt, and when she came to the second verse she sang again: I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls With vassals and serfs at my side, And of all who assembled within those walls That I was the hope and the pride.

James Joyce -- Dubliners

His merits, his learning, his quality of immediate vassal of the Bishop of Paris, threw the doors of the church wide open to him.

Victor Hugo -- The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Then, from all corners of Hrothgar’s sphere of influence and from towns beyond—the vassals’ vassals—an army began to form.

John Gardner -- Grendel

Where pain of unextinguishable fire Must exercise us without hope of end The vassals of his anger, when the scourge Inexorably, and the torturing hour, Calls us to penance?

John Milton -- Paradise Lost

Behind them in long swift lines came all their vassals from the northern mountains, speeding on a gathering wind.

J.R.R. Tolkien -- The Return of the King

I then said to the queen, "since I was now her majesty’s most humble creature and vassal, I must beg the favour, that Glumdalclitch, who had always tended me with so much care and kindness, and understood to do it so well, might be admitted into her service, and continue to be my nurse and instructor."

Jonathan Swift -- Gulliver’s Travels

This would make him the vassal of these men, Alexandrov especially.

Tom Clancy -- The Hunt for Red October

At midnight of the 19th of February, Tom Canty was sinking to sleep in his rich bed in the palace, guarded by his loyal vassals, and surrounded by the pomps of royalty, a happy boy; for tomorrow was the day appointed for his solemn crowning as King of England.

Mark Twain -- The Prince and The Pauper

Her hold on him far exceeded that of a liegelord over her vassal.

Christopher Paolini -- Brisingr

Each of them"the mob and the mob-masters" the wire-pullers and the frightened" the leaders and their pet vassals"know and feel that their lives are built upon a historical deed of wrong against many people, people from whose lives they have bled their leisure and their luxury!

…and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike in danger, drawing forth her dagger to preserve the one at the cost of the other; and just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest pitch, a whistle is heard, and we are straightway transported to the great hall of the castle; where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny chorus with a funnier body of vassals, who are free of all sorts of places, from church vaults to palaces, and roam about in company, carolling perpetually.

Charles Dickens -- Oliver Twist

Both before and after I received the ring I have been a loyal vassal to the King.

T.S. Eliot -- Murder in the Cathedral

"He did endow him with it," answered Cedric; "nor is it my least quarrel with my son, that he stooped to hold, as a feudal vassal, the very domains which his fathers possessed in free and independent right."

Sir Walter Scott -- Ivanhoe

Well, I know not What counts harsh fortune casts upon my face; But in my bosom shall she never come To make my heart her vassal.

William Shakespeare -- Antony and Cleopatra

She was a commoner, and had been sent here on her bridal night by Sir Breuse Sance Pite, a neighboring lord whose vassal her father was, and to which said lord she had refused what has since been called le droit du seigneur, and, moreover, had opposed violence to violence and spilt half a gill of his almost sacred blood.

Mark Twain -- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Lydgate was convinced that if there had been no valid objection to Mr. Farebrother, he would have voted for him, whatever Bulstrode might have felt on the subject: he did not intend to be a vassal of Bulstrode’s.

George Eliot -- Middlemarch

In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels -- The Communist Manifesto

Cambodia had recently been through American bombardment, a civil war, a paroxysm of carnage by local Communists that reduced the small nation by a fifth, and finally occupation by neighboring Vietnam, which by then was a mere vassal of Russia.

Milan Kundera -- The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Once, a vassal was dispatched in haste to the abbey at dead of night, and when morning came, there were sounds of woe and wailing in the sisters’ house; and after this, a mournful silence fell upon it, and knight or lady, horse or armour, was seen about it no more.

Charles Dickens -- Nicholas Nickleby

He once declared: I would rather go down to my political grave with a clear conscience than ride in the chariot of victory as a Congressional stool pigeon, the slave, the servant, or the vassal of any man, whether he be the owner and manager of a legislative menagerie or the ruler of a great nation…… I would rather lie in the silent grave, remembered by both friends and enemies as one who remained true to his faith and who never faltered in what he believed to be his duty, than to…

John F. Kennedy -- Profiles in Courage

And when evening came, holding my hand in her own, as we passed by the little gardens of her vassals, she would point out to me the flowers that leaned their red and purple spikes along the tops of the low walls, and would teach me all their names.

Marcel Proust -- Swann’s Way

Thus it was this evening that I turned to his vassal—a fiend called Prusias.

Henry H. Neff -- The Fiend And The Forge

Each principal vassal was a kind of sovereign, within his particular demesnes.